Monday, March 20, 2006

About that Forecast


snow1
Originally uploaded by hbot3000.
As of 3:30 this afternoon, the national weather service forecast said fairly confidently that the snow storm in the mountains wouldn't deposit any measurable snow in Reno. As of 5:00, this is what the view outside my apartment looked like. So yeah, not their best forecast. I'm not saying they're terrible, they do a pretty good job usually, it's just telling about the state of weather forecasting that we still have days where the forecasts are this wrong. In any case, it made me laugh.

Friday, March 03, 2006

On a more insane note . . .

Nuclear non-proliferation is widely regarded as a Good Idea. This is not nuclear non-proliferation. The funny thing about nuclear weapons, is that not only do they kill lots of innocent people and render whole swaths of ground uninhabitable for many, many years, they also blow lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of tiny, yet harmful radioactive particles into the air. The funny thing about air is that it can actually transport these particles from one place to another using things like “wind” which is caused by “pressure differences” (stop me, Mr. President, if this gets too technical for you). These particles can be transported by this “wind” hundreds and thousands of miles to entirely new places with new people and will eventually be deposited in things like, oh say, drinking water. This in turn leads to things like “radiation poisoning”. In fact, in a study I read a year or two ago (but am too lazy to look up and link to) atmospheric scientists actually did a study about where the air from our atomic testing in the Pacific Ocean went and what effect that might have had on people. They found that the air from some of these tests made their way to certain regions of the united states which, oddly enough had had much higher rates of cancer for the 20 or 30 years after the tests were completed. Hmmmm. This is just one reason why allowing India to make lots more nuclear weapons, is a Bad Idea. Another quick one is that India doesn’t really like Pakistan, who also happens to have a couple of nuclear weapons. So now, we have a new arms race in Asia. Wheee!

Here’s another bad idea: electing as leader of the free world someone who doesn’t see that casually allowing India to make lots of nuclear weapons is a Horrible, Fucking Retarded and Bad Idea. He’s not a harmless, nincompoop president, when he pulls shit like this. It is actually a good thing to have leaders with a higher intelligence than the rest of the population. It would be nice if some grown-ups could speak up around election time and say “Hey everybody, you actually don’t want to vote for a guy you could have a beer with, because he says the craziest shit when he’s drunk. It would probably be good to have a guy who’s smart and inquisitive. Just saying.”

Just saying.